Keynote Presentations

9:00 - 11:00

Steve Krug: Everything you know is wrong

Steve has been a usability consultant for more than 20 years, working on dozens of great projects with smart people at interesting companies. His guide to web usability, Don’t Make Me Think, has sold 300,000 copies, and its younger brother, Rocket Surgery Made Easy was born in December 2009. View presentation as PDF

Marti Hearst: Designing Search for Humans

Most discussion of information retrieval focuses on the algorithms behind search engines and information retrieval systems. However, there’s another side to search: the human users and the tool they use to interact with them — the search user interface. Because of their global reach, search user interfaces must be understandable by and appealing to a wide variety of people of all ages, cultures and backgrounds, and meet an enormous variety of information needs. Hearst will focus on the aspects of this process that can best be supported by the user interface. She will describe the methods behind user interface design generally, and search interface design in particular.

About the Speaker: Dr. Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She received BA, MS, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997. A primary focus of Dr. Hearst’s research is user interfaces for search. She has invented or participated in several well-known search interface projects including Scatter/Gather clustering of search results, TileBars query term visualization, BioText search over the bioscience literature, and the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for collection navigation. She has published extensively on this and other topics. The Flamenco project has had a significant impact in industry and practice; interfaces similar in design to Flamenco are now the standard on e-commerce sites, image navigation sites, and library catalog sites, and support for faceted navigation is now standard in content management systems. Dr. Hearst has also acted as a consultant for a wide range of search companies.

Sessions

Plain Language: Expert Perspectives on What’s Next

Dick Horst, Ginny Redish, Charlene Haykel, Kathryn Summers

11:30 - 12:10 Room A

The movement toward plain language for documents and website content is gaining traction. Through questions from the moderator and the audience, the expert panel will discuss some success stories, provide their perspective on the plain language movement, offer opinions on what’s next, and suggest what usability practitioners should be doing to further the cause. View presentation as PDF

Mobile Web Design and Evaluation: Emerging Trends and Best Practices

Cory Lebson

11:30 - 12:10 Room B

This session is an introductory overview of the mobile Web user experience, including the design and evaluation of mobile interfaces. Using a case study from a government client, the presenter will describe how issues were resolved when the client decided to “go mobile” with an alternative version of their existing web site.

E-Commerce Usability: Using Eye Tracking to Improve Results

Michael Summers

12:20 - 1:00 Room A

By watching hundreds of real purchases and applying eye tracking technology, the presenter has developed a detailed knowledge of the key obstacles to conversion for e-commerce sites, as well as principles that extend to the broader process of on-line registration in any context. He will share insights about product foraging, evaluation, and checkout, with examples from top web sites.

User Interface Design Trends for Faceted Search

Duane Degler

12:20 - 1:00 Room B

Faceted navigation and filtering is now a common part of search results interfaces. Yet with so many variations on the Web, it is not obvious how to design facet UIs to be most usable. This presentation focuses on the different styles of facet interfaces that are emerging, along with the types of things designers and usability specialists need to consider when creating or evaluating those interfaces. View presentation as PDF

Express Usability: How to Conduct and Present a Usability Study in One Week or Less

Sarah Weise & Linna Manomaitis

2:00 - 2:40 Room A

Without the luxury of unlimited time and budget for user-centered analysis and design, a 40-hour study can be a low-risk way to introduce usability to a project and make a difference in a short time frame. Through real-world examples and a hands-on activity, attendees will take away some express approaches to traditional data gathering, analysis, and presentation techniques. View presentation from SlideShare

Boardroom Secrets: Putting UX on the Agenda

Kate Walser

2:00 - 2:40 Room B

Discover how to decipher business information and lingo and translate it into business objectives and benefits that usability professionals can provide. Attendees will learn what executives care about, how to find the right people within an organization who can help, how to create a simple plan that will open boardroom doors, and what is needed to take that simple plan and turn it into an entire program.

Cranky conversations about Users

Interactive facilitated session with Dan Willis

2:00 - 3:30 Room C

Dan Willis uses the quirky entries of his blog uxcrank.com as a jumping off point for a lively, fully involved conversation with the audience around key user experience issues including: The Cherry Blossom Effect (satisfying users by expecting less from them); Your Inner Lumper (the impact of our wiring on our work); and How People Choose (the practical ramifications of dealing with the human brain.)

Universal Usability and Accessibility for Rich Internet Applications

Ann Chadwick-Dias & Marguerite Bergel

2:50 - 3:30 Room A

As the web becomes a richly interactive experience through new technologies such as Flash, Flex, DHTML, and AJAX, universal usability and accessibility issues are driven to the forefront. The presenters will examine case studies involving dynamic content and will show video clips of usability sessions with participants of all abilities to illustrate design challenges and solutions.

Going Beyond Usability to Excite and Engage Your Users

Spencer Gerroll & Andrew Schall

2:50 - 3:30 Room B

Usability alone does not engage our users. Attendees of this session will learn about user engagement, including a psychological basis of what attracts users. The presenters will show how to conduct the appropriate research that informs engaging design, how to design a more engaging user experience, and how to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of user engagement.

Agile Usability: Overcoming the Us vs Them Problem

Jason Lee

4:00 - 4:40 Room A

Agile methods have been widely adopted within the software industry. However, usability professionals often have trouble working within agile teams due to procedural, cultural and personal differences. We will describe the challenges of integrating usability into an agile team from both a usability and an agile developer perspective. We will also detail how those challenges can be overcome, drawing on experiences from our own agile usability approach, extreme scenario-based design, as well as other leading integration methods.View presentation as PDF

Strategic Design: Aligning Business Goals and User Needs

Chris Avore

4:00 - 4:40 Room B

This session will show how strategic focus and delivering value across the customer engagement lifecycle can help user experience professionals align organizational strategic goals and objectives with user needs through targeted approaches and methods. Attendees will learn how to leverage core user experience skills to inform and guide strategic design thinking.View presentation as PDF

Low-Hanging Fruit: Making an Impact as a First Step Towards Change

Bennett Lauber

4:50 - 5:30 Room A

Have you ever been asked for a list of the low hanging fruit in order to “fix” the usability of a product? Attendees will learn what the true low hanging fruits are, how to present the output from usability practices in formats that can be more easily consumed by software development organizations, and how to have an immediate and lasting impact on the usability of products.View presentation as PDF

Helping Users Find a Needle in a Haystack: Lessons in Search from Your TV Guide

Lorelei Brown

4:50 - 5:30 Room B

Does your business demand that users find something that they like or need, even if they aren’t looking for it? How can you turn the serendipity of the browse into a satisfactory destination? Learn how to focus your search results and CMS relationships from this case study surrounding cable television search across a library of half a million items.

Great value for the price and very practical case studies.

Exposure to the research going on; practical steps I can take in my work.